2016-06-18 war blinders and more (not so) simple things

Since my last note here, which hardly anyone has read, anyone not completely detached from any news obviously knows of what has happened in the following days, and become the thing that becomes The One Story in The World on CNN.

The story involved, of course, is the weekend event where some sociopath went into a nightclub in Orlando and shot up the place, murdering several dozen people and wounding a bunch more, according to reports.

Ever since then, there is no surprise in seeing, not only the infotainment “news media” machinery churning away continuously, while mainly consisting of noise, but also the intense frenzy of noisy chatter around the web, especially in social media world. It’s an almost perfect storm of noise fuel, managing to combine the trigger item subjects of firearms, homosexual people, and terrorism, and off it goes. One strange item seems oddly overlooked. This happened Saturday night in Orlando, following the Friday night in Orlando when a singer I had never heard of, but apparently known from appearing on one of the TV talent show competitions some people seem to love so much, was shot (and later died) while standing around talking to people outside the venue after her show in Orlando. What’s the deal with Orlando?

[edit note- After writing that, there was another terrible event when a small child was killed by an alligator at Disney World, in Orlando. Really, what is the deal about Orlando? It’s a little bizarre.]

Somehow that didn’t get added to the pile, in terms of people chattering about there being an Orlando issue. That would not be very surprising, added to the furious chattering and squabbling about the bigger weekend shooting murdering, which does not just have people making declarations and arguing about an issue about the Orlando nightclub massacre, but the extra layer of people arguing about what is the issue.

It’s a gun issue!

No, it’s a gay LGBTQ (or whatever acronyms it is now) issue!

No, it’s a terrorism issue!

It’s an Islam issue!

That might be the real kicker here. Here we have an episode where we don’t merely have something that triggers all the programming in people about their side versus the other side, but the extra layer of people squabbling about what issue it is.

This burst of insanity in Orlando pretty clearly replaced the arguments and noise about child supervision and zookeeping, which in turn had replaced the arguments and noise about public bathroom usage between males, females, and all the other genders.

One interesting little item online today pointed out something for thought. It was “and just like that, everyone forgot about the California election fraud“.

Well, golly, how about that!

Is there anything else we’re missing?

Step away from all that and consider, for example, the story of a survey in Russia showing that the United States, Ukraine and Turkey are seen by Russians surveyed as the nations most hostile to their country, with a reported 72% of them regarding the United States as the nation most hostile to Russia.

This is pretty serious, and, I have to say immediately that it’s probably something a large number of people will misunderstand badly. Considering the continuous banging of war drums in Washington directed at damned near anybody about anything, it’s an utterly predictable guess to figure that a large number of Americans, if they even become aware of that, are trained so thoroughly by misinformation and hyperbole (that is, propaganda) that they are most likely to have irrational reflex reactions, immediately taking such news as an obvious indication that those terrible Russians are just centering their existence around following the evil villain dictator Putin and making war on Europe and taking over the world. This, it should be obvious, is complete bullshit, but given the endless barrage of fiction and nonsense pumped into people’s heads from Washington officialdom and the neocon club, via the conduits of what they get from “news media”, a random survey of people here in the US, and some of Europe, is probably more likely to find people holding this nonsense in their heads, completely oblivious to the more realistic conclusion, that a large portion of the Russian population regard the United States today as a nation that is completely dominated by megalomaniacs and general lunacy.

One little thoroughly obscured item is an international survey from a couple of years ago, which showed that in a survey of people around the world, the United States was the clear frontrunner, by a huge margin, as the nation named by respondents as the nation that they regarded as the world’s greatest threat to world peace.

There is something that people have been pointing out for some years, at this point, and that is the way that recent history and current events related to the world and the US government are so confused, so obscured and mired in constant obfuscation and simple raw blatant lying.

If you scan around to get a handle on general American public consensus about Russia and events in Europe, it’s virtually guaranteed that you’ll find an endless supply of people who don’t just simply not know what has been happening, and is happening, but have it completely wrong. I’m not overstating this. When I say completely wrong, I really mean that there are many people who, if they even happen to be vaguely aware of some sort of trouble in Europe about Ukraine and Russia, have it completely wrong.

The origin of this stand-off between the U.S. and Russia goes back to promises that the West had made in 1990 to the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, not to expand NATO up to the borders of Russia, and the West’s subsequent violations of those repeatedly made promises. Gorbachev disbanded the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact, on the basis of those false assurances from Western leaders. Thus, Russia is surrounded now by enemies, including former Warsaw Pact nations and even some former regions of the Soviet Union itself, such as Ukraine and the Baltic republics, which now host NATO forces. NATO is interpreting Russia’s acceptance of the Crimean’s’ desire to abandon Ukraine and rejoin Russia following the 2014 Ukrainian coup, as constituting a showing of an intent by Russia to invade NATO nations that had formerly been part of the Soviet Union and of the Warsaw Pact, such as Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia; and this is the alleged reason for America’s Operation Atlantic Resolve, and the steep increase in U.S. troops and weapons in those nations that border on Russia.

That article follows closely after another from a few days ago talking about NATO military forces encircling the European borders of Russia, which is not actually a new development, but something that has been gradually happening for some time now, more or less ever since the neocon crowd in Washington started a determined program to create diversions from their support (and very probably direct involvement) for the violent coup d’etat overthrowing the elected president of Ukraine and replacement with a puppet government making Ukraine a vassal state under Washington’s control.

This saga, the Ukraine meddling by Washington megalomaniacs and the ugly consequences, is just one case of “regime change” games from Washington, and it just falls right in line with a batch of regime change games that don’t turn out well, any way you look at them. The Ukraine saga is just one chapter in a recurring story of the neocon ambitions of “regime change” anywhere and everywhere some country in the world has a government in charge that fails to play ball with Washington’s direction and orders.

I’ve already talked about how the bunch generally referred to as the neocons, short for neoconservatives (and also sometimes “neoliberals”, which probably adds to the confusion for many people) are dedicated to the positions and plans that had been publically outlined by the now officially defunct Project for the New American Century, which, in shortest summary form, holds as their basic fundamental principle the idea that the United States of America (under their control, naturally) had become the natural and right ruler of the entire world, and that the appearance of anyone, any government and nation, that presented anything like a challenge or obstacle to that was to be treated as a threat, an enemy to be squashed into submission or simply destroyed.

Somehow, despite the events of actual reality over a couple of decades (or more), it never seems to occur to the people locked into this madness that there might be a more realistic principle to see and absorb. If you set out on a plan and program to rule the entire world, this might not go well.

Seriously, does anyone learn anything from history?

The extra disturbing layer of problem comes in the question of how many Americans have any awareness of the fact that the lunatics in the Washington neocon club, with the NATO member nations obediently toeing the line, are damned close to starting World War III. They are not merely poking Russia with pointed sticks trying to provoke them, but they seem to be doing similar, if less extreme, games with China.

The situation in Ukraine itself certainly looks like another case of consequences of the neocon games of “regime change”, which in simplest terms amounts to bringing chaos, mayhem, ruin, and grief and suffering to every place they touch. These guys have an amazing ability to meddle in places around the world where there are problems, and make things much worse.

In Ukraine, notions they might have had about installing a nice cooperative government obedient to their plans seem to have gone a little haywire. The nation of Ukraine basically appears to have gone from being a “failed state” to becoming a more failed state.

Given the broadly divided nature of Ukraine, something that can be seen fairly well in the poll I pointed out before, this was evidently seen as some kind of trick lever to work to get control of a nation on Russia’s border, with a long deep relationship with Russia, and a president who was apparently set on maintaining close relations with Russia. The reasons why form quite a complex bundle of their own.

The trouble started when the elected president, Yanukovych, decided to back out of a new economic agreement with the European Union after apparently consulting with advisors who suggested that this would in fact be very bad for Ukraine. That cracks open another whole ugly complex can of worms. We’re talking about a kind of ongoing scheme where some country with not such a wonderful economy is offered enticing seductive sales pitches with promises of wonderful economic growth and prosperity, if only they engage with the European and American banking system. The country is then accepts offers of help and aid that actually saddle them with massive debt that they will almost certainly never be able to repay, although the pitch tells them that, of course they will, because of all that growth and prosperity that will result. When things don’t go so well, and financial troubles hit because of the debts, in come the demands for repayment and responsibility, and then you get demands for “financial austerity”, where the troubled government is expected to hack away anything beneficial to their citizens to repay the banks, and then, to satisfy the unpayable debt, helpful suggestions are made about “privatization”, and the wealth and resources of the nation are then plundered and looted. Look up the term “economic hitman”, for a start.

When that happened, surprise, surprise, immediate protests and violent rioting started up in Kiev, and what was reported here as a popular uprising of the Ukrainian people for freedom and democracy overthrew the elected president in a coup d’etat. The US government, surprise again, instantly recognized the new junta as the new legitimate government. A new Prime Minister appeared to take control, Yatsenyuk, AKA “Yats” as referred to by US Assistant Secretary of State Nuland in her infamous phone call with the US Ambassador to Ukraine discussing who would take control of the government after the coup that had not happened yet.

“Yats” is gone from that job, and they still have the president that was elected after an election that was held after the coup, what Washington praised and hailed as “democracy” taking hold in Ukraine, even though they had a democratically elected president before. That vote happened without the regions of Crimea and the eastern zone called the Donbass, areas that had voted for the overthrown Yanukovych. From all signs I can see, the new gang resulting from this episode of “regime change” is at least as corrupt and dysfunctional as the previous (failed state to more failed state).

Evidently the Washington neocon crowd saw no problem with the involvement of the neo-Nazi gangs of the northwest regions in the coup, and then taking positions of power in the new regime, along with running amok unofficially, or perhaps unofficially, at least, it’s hard to know for sure. The obvious suspicion is that it’s not unofficial at all, just slightly covert, and it’s more than a little disturbing in its similarity to the SA, the “brownshirts”, of Nazi Germany.

The menace and mayhem of that large portion of the Ukraine story is clearly a large factor in what may have been entirely unforeseen consequences of the regime change game, that their new prize holding of Ukraine did not include the region of Crimea and the eastern Donbass region, as people in those areas watched the events in Kiev and what unfolded elsewhere and reacted by basically saying “oh, hell no!”. All that has been covered before, of course I’ve been repeating it simply because the story has been so buried in deception and obfuscation. The people in Crimea voted in the referendum called by the Crimean parliament and voted by a massively overwhelming margin to declare themselves independent of Ukraine and formally ask to rejoin Russia, again becoming part of Russia as they had been until 1954. There is a simple basic reason why this is referred to as “reunification” over there (Crimea and Russia).

The result of the eastern Donbass region refusing to accept the coup overthrowing what they regarded as their president was to be declared “terrorists” and attacked by the Ukrainian military under the orders of the new junta. The Russian naval base on the Crimean coast of the Black Sea is, as I’ve been pointing out, their only Black Sea naval base to protect the stretch of Russian coastline on the Black Sea, and anybody with any sense at all would understand it as obvious that they were never going to allow that to be compromised, let alone leave it, and they went into full defensive alert mode. That then included securing Crimea, which was what the people there wanted, something greeted with a large sense of relief by the people there, considering the hostilities launched at them by the new junta in Kiev, and that almost certainly was the only thing that prevented a mass occurrence of the kind of malevolent horrors that happened in Odessa, where the neo-Nazi gangs rolled in to stomp anybody who might be opposed to the new regime, a place along the Black Sea coast outside the Crimea region, not under the protection of the Russian military.

It’s ridiculously obvious to assume what nobody in Washington will openly say, that part of the plan was that the neocons would come out of it claiming the prize of taking over the Russian naval base, enabling full control of the Black Sea by Washington, whether by what would officially NATO naval forces (completely under their control), or the US Navy alone, so that the exposed and unprotected Russian coastline could have warships under their control to, shall we say, “send a message” to Russia, the ongoing neocon plan- “you sit there quietly and shut up and stay out of everything, because we rule the world, and if you cause difficulty, you’ll have big trouble”.

In the same vein, it has been obvious that part of the big plan of the neocon bunch was to follow the installation of a “Washington friendly” regime in Kiev by moving NATO (US) military forces including “defensive” missiles aimed at Russia along the Ukrainian-Russian border, with the same “message”. That hasn’t gone that way, of course, as a result of those pesky “Russian rebels” in the eastern Donbass region.

All this, of course, has been covered, and I use that word in the meaning of covered as in obscured, hidden, by the maintenance of the official Washington narratives as “Russia’s invasion and seizure of Crimea”, or more subtle “invasion and annexation”, leaving out the part about what the people in Crimea wanted, or alternative versions like “Putin’s invasion and annexation of Crimea”, promoting the sort of negative Cult of Personality evil bogeyman Bond movie villain image. The assault of the new regime in Kiev launching the Ukrainian military at other Ukrainians in the east who refused to recognize and accept the gang who overthrew their government has been “Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine” and “Russia’s war in the east”, often painting a nice little propaganda narrative presented as something like those brave underdog revolutionaries rising up for freedom and democracy in Ukraine battling against the odds to fight off the invasion of the evil Russia, not a junta including actual neo-Nazis overthrowing an elected government and then attacking Ukrainians in the east who are literally fighting for their homes and lives.

The propaganda is relentless, and it has a remarkable effect, a terrible effect. It should be apparent, but evidently rarely is, how much we’re bombarded and absolutely saturated with propaganda here in the United States. This whole overriding problem is covered very well by a concise video interview piece on the subject that should be considered essential viewing by any American, Propaganda & Engineering Consent for Empire with Mark Crispin Miller. The propaganda, of all sorts, is so effective precisely because of the reasons examined so well in that piece- it isn’t just that it’s so pervasive that it saturates people and becomes a framework of “normal”, it’s also because of a disturbing and destructive delusion that is totally ubiquitous, the idea that says we don’t have propaganda here in America, that’s something that happens in other bad places that don’t have our freedom and democracy! As other people have recognized and pointed out, it’s arguably much worse here and now in the US because of that, whereas people living in circumstances like the Soviet Union had no such illusions and anybody with any functioning sense and intelligent understood perfectly well that their governments and what was presented as “news” were feeding them massive piles of complete bullshit that they were not foolish enough to believe.

Between that, and all the diversions, it’s hard for anything real and true to get through. It’s so bizarre now that even somebody using the word “truth” can be marked as some sort of delusional radical weirdo of some variety to be avoided or laughed off. At this point, naturally, many people will have already had appear in their minds the phrase “conspiracy theory”, along with those wacky nutball “conspiracy theorists”. Add in the problem of bipolar political disorder and it gets even more impenetrable, as people get buried in all the notions about propaganda versus “the real news” between their side (The Good Guys) versus the other side (The Bad Guys).

Obviously, if you have been reading things here over the past two years plus, you know that there have been pages about the Ukraine drama, and that I just wrote several paragraphs more. The preceding paragraphs are not all pure repetition, as there are pieces of the story that certainly are repeated, but more that I have not covered, and this matters, not just in reviewing a massive drama that is so badly confused and obscured in the American public realm. There is always more that I haven’t covered, an inherent problem in a complex chunk of reality that has been so badly warped by simplistic propaganda, and in this case, some context for the subject of how the neocon meddling and ambitions of Empire go so reliably haywire, and, as an extra layer of consequence, present a real danger of these lunatics actually starting World War III.

There is still more, just in that tangled drama, for example, the horror story of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17. MH17 was shot down on July 17, 2014, killing 298 passengers and crew, over eastern Ukraine, and it’s hard to know when we might ever really know the true story, if ever. Notice how little you have heard about that since the period that began practically as soon as the crash happened when the US news was immediately filled with proclamations from Washington officialdom that it was a “slam dunk“, with “incontrovertible evidence” (that was never shown) that it was the Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine, the Russian backed rebels, then the actual Russian military, then even that it was shot down by Vladimir Putin himself. Having planted these memes in the public consciousness, the story subtly and quickly faded and disappeared, despite all the initial righteous noises and poses about getting to the bottom of this. The job was done, evidently.

But we don’t have propaganda here, right?

The notions had been firmly and simply planted about a horrendous mass murder in a most terrible way by those nasty terrorist rebels and their war against the freedom-loving Ukrainians and Russian invasion and the evil villain Putin. Never mind the loads of people extremely suspicious of that narrative and people making serious cases that the truth involved the airliner being shot down by the Ukrainian military, and even that the airliner had been brought down by machine gun fire and/or an air to air missile from Ukrainian warplanes, and this was a deliberately horrific false flag operation designed to blame the rebelling people in eastern Ukraine. Never mind that these people were being relentlessly attacked by the Ukrainian military being commanded by the new gang seizing power in Kiev, including bombardment by Ukrainian warplanes (while having none of their own). But it was not just blaming them, of course. As I said, the noisy propaganda continuously presented this horror as being directly coming from Putin and the Russian military.

That’s a whole gigantic pile of gnarled mess, and I’ve left that aside with all the other parts of the Ukrainian clusterfuck, that taking enough time and space as it is. This only comes up here, now, because of coming across a new piece online saying that the Dutch and Australian armed forces were almost dragged into the mess because the US wanted them to roll into eastern Ukraine along the Russian border and maybe help get World War III started and make themselves cannon fodder on behalf of the Washington neocons.

Checking any news about the situation in virtually any medium commonly accepted as “mainstream” or “legit” news media here in the US is almost certain to comply with the Washington propaganda. They are all almost guaranteed to invariably toe the party line of what many people just collectively refer to as the War Party, a dominant force in Washington, and not just the corporate megalith entertainment operations. Even NPR and PBS get in on the act and play along.

Recent news brought a story from NPR, NATO War Games In Poland Get Russia’s Attention, and I’m sure it does have Russia’s attention. This has been an ongoing thing, and I don’t mean only this specific little war game exercise. This specific episode is just part of an ongoing story, the larger saga all being about the Washington War Party neocon club incessantly barking about Russian aggression, and claiming an imminent threat to Europe, pushing NATO up against the European borders of Russia. It’s actually to the point where it’s not so unusual to actually read items where you read the term Russian Aggression, capitalized just like that, a not so subtle indication of the way the idea “Russian Aggression” has actually been established as a kind of permanent lingo. As the Washington drums have hammered away about the supposed “Russian invasion of Ukraine” and “Russia’s war in eastern Ukraine to provide cover and diversion from what the head honcho of private intelligence company STRATFOR said “truly was the most blatant coup in history“, one early item coming from Washington was to start howling alarms at European governments about “Russian aggression and demand major increases in their “defense spending”.

Do you suppose there might be any parties who would possibly rake in gigantic amounts of money from such massively increased European “defense” spending?

There’s one hint of just one motive for all the noise about “Russian aggression” and the alleged Russian threat.

In the slightly complicated subject of likely motives for the support of a coup in Ukraine, just one of them, going back to the neocon ambitions to squash into submission any government that might be an obstacle to the Washington neocon domination of the planet, is the idea of the US military (under cover of being NATO) being installed right on Russia’s border with Ukraine, a nation that had been a relatively friendly buffer zone for Russia, including missile installations right along Russia’s border pointed at Russia, for, you know, our “defense”. That, again, has been just slightly complicated for the neocon crowd by those pesky rebels in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine who refused to accept the overthrow of their government, and then had the sheer gall to refuse to either die or flee their home territory.

Another item from the past few days was a web article about Russian spy ships stalking US Navy during large NATO exercise. Imagine that, Russian spy ships keeping close tabs on military vessels from a nation thousands of miles away with a government relentlessly hostile to Russia over the last few years, operating in war game exercises in another body of water bordering Russian coastline. Why, the nerve of those Russians! That one follows other recent news items about encounters between Russian military aircraft and US Navy ships or aircraft in the Baltic Sea, invariably reported in the news here with alarming proclamations from Washington PR people about Russian aggression and danger and “unprofessionalism”.

In short, an ongoing item for a few years now has been constant aggression along the European borders of Russia, and it’s not the fucking Russians doing it!

Back to the current big diversion of the moment, which actually encompasses a couple different diversions, it appears that part of the dog and pony show of sports theater of the presidential election farce will include some amount of posing between the “presumptive nominees” of “the two party system” about who will, if President, do more of bombing ISIS, in Syria and Iraq, because, apparently, this is the thing to do after a guy from New York City living in Orlando went into a nightclub and shot a bunch of people.

Ah, yes. Syria.

Here’s another gem, a new item about how people in the State Department, you know, the organization in our national government about relations with the rest of the world, are petitioning for “a change in the way the United States approaches Syria — specifically, advocating military pressure on Bashar Assad’s regime to push him toward the negotiating table”. Really? This is the department that does diplomacy? Actually, is this even surprising?

Would this be negotiating with the bunch in Washington who have been talking about “regime change” and declaring “Assad must go!” for years?

Incidentally, about that whole bit about mass bombing of “ISIS”, do you suppose there might be anyone who rakes in massive amounts of money selling the explosive stuff blowing up and all that goes with delivering it to the places where it goes boom? Then, when it goes boom, we obviously have to order lots more to replace it, right?

Elsewhere in recent reading, a piece by Robert Kennedy Jr. pretty well laid out the reality of foreign policy in the middle east specifically focused on Syria.